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Royal Lyceum Theatre4 starsOn a movie screen, a terrified young woman is pleading for her life in what could be a scene from a lo-fi horror flick. The next time we see the woman we find out is called Alice, she’s in front of a camera again, just as scared as she auditions for a hard-core porn film. Is Alice for real here, or is she faking it, to death if necessary?These are some of the questions being asked by director Matthew Lenton in Vanishing Point’s look at the dark side of pornography, co-produced with two Italian companies and Trmway, Glasgow. Here, as Alice’s tale is paralleled by an internet porn addict’s own descent, performers, directors and consumers become complicit in some psycho-sexual rabbit hole where love, erotica and even cheap thrills are forsaken in favour of what looks like extreme forms of mutual abuse.The third in Vanishing Point’s loose-knit trilogy of impressionistic works seen largely behind glass, where Interiors and Saturday Night looked at the public and …

It's just before 10am in the Traverse Theatre, and artistic director
Orla O'Loughlin has an awards ceremony to get to. It may be the last
week of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but O'Loughlin has already been
at work for two hours, as she has been for pretty much every day of
August. The reason for such un-artistic early starts is Dream Plays
(Scenes From a Play I'll Never Write), the series of twelve performed
readings of newly commissioned works curated and directed by O'Loughlin
with playwright David Greig, and which ran each day over two weeks.
As the mini season's name suggests, each reading took place at 9am, a
time when most Fringe carousers are just settling into some rapid eye
movement after a night propping up their favoured watering hole. With a
final hour's rehearsal for each play beginning at 8am, for O'Loughlin
and Greig, at least, sleep has become something of a luxury in the
rapid turnover required for each play.
The first …

Assembly George Square
3 stars
When Joe Douglas visited his Auntie Marie in Uganda on his gap year a
decade ago, it opened up the then eighteen year old's eyes to a world
of possibilities. One of these came in the form of Ronnie, a boy of his
own age he instantly hit it off with. When Douglas returned to the UK,
Ronnie sent him an email, asking him for a small amount of money to
help get him through school. Another email followed, asking for more,
and so it went, with assorted university fees, hospital bills and
emergency payments, which combined almost hit the twenty grand mark.
Bearing in mind that while Douglas was forking out all this, he was
going through his own penny-pinching student years, and could have done
with the extra cash himself.
By transferring his real-life experience into a very candid monologue,
Douglas has laid what is either a divine faith in people or spectacular
naivete bare in an honest and self-deprecatory fashion. Where the
subject might so…

King’s Theatre4 stars When a rowdy bunch burst noisily through the auditorium wielding a felled, full-size tree-trunk at the opening of Dmitry Krymov’s Russian language reimagining of Shakespeare’s frothiest rom-com, only the little dog padding about astride the tree truly knows what we’re in for. Krymov’s production, commissioned by the Chekhov International Theatre Festival for his School of Dramatic Art Theatre, after all, is billed as something ‘after Shakespeare’ rather than of it.So it goes in a wildly irreverent work that puts the Rude Mechanicals at the centre of the action rather than cast as the usual comic fall guys, even if there are prat-falls aplenty. Once the tree-trunk, then a leaky fountain, is disposed of on a stage covered with plastic sheeting, the troupe of players change into formal attire as they await their audience. This comes in the shape of a bunch of disgruntled toffs, whose mobile phones interrupt the action in a makeshift VIP area even as the sternest of…

Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre5 starsBefore Theatre du Soleil’s four hour epic on life, death, revolution and the creative impulse itself has even begun, you’ve already entered into another world via a foyer transformed into an illusory idyll. With the company’s vast ensemble cast visible through a gauze curtain preparing themselves in makeshift dressing rooms, such an occupation sets the tone for an astonishing spectacle on a huge purpose-built wooden stage that recreates that contained in the company’s Paris home.What translates as Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises) is ostensibly based on a posthumously published Jules Verne novel, in which a pair of Socialist idealists attempt to make a film on no money as the First World War’s early rumblings begin to stir. Director Ariane Mnouchkine, writer Helene Cixous and an army of collaborators have created something so exquisitely self-reflexive that it goes some way to capturing the spirit and wisdom of Theatre du Soleil’s own ut…

3 stars
The mock-up of the Berlin Wall painted with a German flag over-laden
with peace symbols onstage is the perfect embodiment of East-West
unification, especially when two dancing girls and a man in a sparkly
1980s jacket kick their way through the bricks that are holding it all
together. By this time the beach-balls bouncing around the auditorium
and the mass onstage Conga has already ensnared a room packed with
willing worshippers.
But this isn't some iconoclastic melding of east European avant-gardism
and pop culture appropriating post-modernism. This is TV's best known
former lifeguard's bombastic solo show, and we are all culpable.
Opening with a big-screen montage of his greatest hits, Hasselhoff
enters from the back of the auditorium singing a rat pack style
rendition of Nina Simone's Feeling Good, before strutting his way to
the stage for a tea-time diversion of taking stock, Hoff-style.
What this means is a loose-knit narrative from Knight Ri…

Royal Lyceum Theatre5 starsIt’s a glorious sleight of hand, putting Brechtian style cabaret performed by a genuine Fringe phenomonan into the Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme. In Irish chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan’s vivid rendering of Shakespeare’s epic poem of one woman’s bloody violation and the self-destruction it inspires, EIF, along with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose banner Elizabeth Freestone’s production falls under, have struck gold.The intensity of what ensues is difficult to gauge from O’Sullivan’s chattily casual entrance with pianist and co-composer Feargal Murray. Dressed in a floor-length death-black dress and wearing her hair tied up on a sumptuous-looking stage piled high with stacks of paper and descending wall-hangings that veer from stained to distressed, O’Sullivan segues her introduction into Shakespeare’s verse with a seamless charm her Irish accent lures you in with.This already is streets ahead of old-school readings of the poem, but wh…

The final compendium of short new plays with a conscience done in a
lo-fi script-in-hand manner in the Traverse bar cafe first thing in the
morning was a part greatest hits, part world exclusive show that fully
justified the initiative's Bank of Scotland Herald Angel win at the
weekend. Two plays, Anders Lustgarten's The Break Out and Clara
Brennan's heartfelt and life-affirming monologue, Spine, had been
deemed good enough to merit speedy revivals.
Lustgarten's piece about two female jailbirds who find they're able to
break out with ease after prison budget cuts mean less bricks in the
walls even had the added bonus of two different actresses playing the
cell-mates to add a different energy to proceedings. It is Spine,
however, that should be downloaded and distributed (free of charge, as
with all Theatre Uncut contributions) post-haste. Rosie Wyatt's
rendering of Brennan's beautiful play about a pan-generational alliance
in care of a horde o…

While Theatre Uncut occupied a 10am slot each Monday morning of the
Fringe, the other six days of the week were equally occupied with
immediacy. Taking place at what in Edinburgh terms is a bleary-eyed
9am, this series of compendium of brand new works by largely
established writers allows them to run away with their imaginations in
a series of script in hand presentations, with half coming under the
directorship of Traverse artistic director Orla O'Loughlin, and half
with playwright David Greig.
The first week opened with Most Favoured, a look by David Ireland at
how the second coming might work out if it involved a KFC obsessed
angel and a far from virgin Mary in a cheap hotel room where a one
night stand suddenly becomes bigger than both of them. With Gabriel
Quigley's desperate singleton a priceless foil to Jordan McCurrach's
junk-food obsessed angel, Ireland has penned a scurrilously
sacrilegious bite-size sketch that one could imagine being developed
f…

The Russians, it has often been noted, approach Chekhov in a vastly
different manner than how English theatre-makers do. Where a home-grown
production of The Cherry Orchard might be full of laughs, a British
take on Chekhov is likely to make heavy classicist weather of the
playwright's pre-absurdist ennui. Whether the same reverence applies to
Russian directors when taking on Shakespeare's canon remains to be seen
as Russian wunderkind Dmitry Krymov arrives at the Edinburgh
International Festival this week with his version of ultimate seasonal
rom-com, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In an EIF theatre season that is awash with reinvented classics,
Krymov's Dream has been brought to Edinburgh via the Moscow-based
Chekhov International Theatre Festival and Krymov's own Laboratory
School of Art Theatre Production. The production was commissioned,
however, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, who have just previewed it
over nine days as part of the 2012 World Sha…

The Shit – Summerhall
4 stars
A naked woman squats astride a platform holding in to a microphone and
precious little else in Cristian Ceresoli's solo play, performed in an
unflinching, no-holds-barred howl of rage by Silvia Gallerano. Whether
live art prop or practical aids to counteract the room’s boomy
acoustics isn’t clear, but it certainly helps Gallerano spew out
Ceresoli's litany of self-loathing to pin you to your seat.
As Gallerano's mouth moves in rapid-fire shapes akin to some blood and
lipstick smeared form of origami, nothing is hidden, not the narrator's
bulimia, nor her messed-up relationships with her father, nor her chase
after fame. Subtitled The Disgust Decalogue Number 1, this is a
relentlessly confrontational piece of work that tumbles from
Gallerano's gut as if ripping the skin from her very being. By turns
shrill, even as she laughs at herself, Gallerano delivers an exhausting
but utterly compelling verbal symphony that never flin…

In the Bois de Vincennes, an old munitions factory on the outskirts of
Paris, the day is just beginning for Theatre du Soleil, the radical
theatre company founded on radical ideals of collectivism in 1964. The
company are preparing to bring their epic production of Les Naufrages
du Fol Espoir (Aurores), or The Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises)
in English, to Edinburgh in an all too rare appearance on British soil.
The production, loosely adapted from a posthumously published novel by
Jules Verne, tells the story of a 1914 voyage of the Fol Espoir to Cape
Horn, where the ship's passengers want to set up an idealistic
community while the rest of the world drives relentlessly to what
became the First World War. Meanwhile, a film crew attempt to tell this
tale of doomed utopianism by using restaurant staff as actors.
On one level, the tale reflects the existence, philosophy, working
methods and ideals of Theatre du Soleil itself. When they were founded,
the Cold Wa…

The Hub4 starsWhen writer and director of this Chilean double bill Guillermo Calderon introduces his work at the front of the Hub’s intimate purpose-built stage, it sums up his entire aesthetic, if not the anger that follows in his dialogue. Because at no point is anything hidden by the three women who appear in both works that dissect Chile’s post-Pinochet legacy, linked by a song as they move the set around in-between the two.Villa finds the three gathered around a table holding a miniature of Villa Grimaldi, the former dictator’s notorious torture house. The trio have been co-opted to decide what should happen to the site in a democratic Chile. Should Grimaldi be flattened and the land re-developed? Or should it be converted into a museum as a reminder of the atrocities carried out there? An initial vote is split three ways, with one ballot paper spoilt. The fierce debate that ensues reveals far more than just the fact that they’re all called Alejandra.As the three then don the sas…

Stellar Quines are full of surprises. The female-focused theatre
company who have slowly but surely become a fantastical force in
Scottish theatre may appear to be shrinking if the size of their new
show is anything to go by, but in actual fact, the company's artistic
imagination is more expansive than ever. The last two Stellar Quines
productions, Age of Arousal and ANA, were big, main-stage affairs that
looked at sex and sensuality through a woman's eyes via a form of
magical-realism that defined both plays' Quebecois roots.
The company's new show, The List, which has an Edinburgh Festival
Fringe run at Summerhall before going out on a brief Scottish tour, is
also written by a Quebecois playwright. In sharp contrast to the other
plays, however, Jennifer Tremblay's piece is an intimate work written
for one actor, who must look the audience full in the face as she
confesses her role in a neighbour's death. Where ANA took five years to
reach the st…

Monkey Bars – Traverse – 4 starsWith the pan-generational mix of teenage angst and impending death onstage at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Chris Goode's new verbatim piece taken from conversations initiated by Karl James looks to an even younger generation for guidance. Goode's own co-production with the Unicorn Theatre then has adult actors suited and booted in grown-up office and dinner-party wear. The juxtaposition between half-formed voices possibly learned from parents by rote and a presentation and delivery that givers the performers the air of politicians or bureaucrats is a fascinating one.Talk of favourite sweets and playtime is subsequently given the weight by Goode's six performers of life-changing events that they actually do when you're eight years old. This avoids any Kids Say the Funniest Things style cutesiness, and is more akin to the very first series of Michael Apted's seminal and ongoing TV documentary, Seven Up. That crucial socia…

Summerhall until September 27th 2012
4 stars
There is no more perfect show to illustrate where Summerhall has come
from than this vast display of avant-garde detritus culled from the
even vaster archive of the Edinburgh-based Heart Fine Art set-up. From
John and Yoko to Gilbert and George to Jake and Dinos Chapman,
everybody's here in an eminently tactile but tantalisingly untouchable
display of all the abstract art-stars that made the twentieth century.
Books, badges, manifestos, pamphlets, calling cards, provocations, an
inevitable first edition of Guy Debord's 'La Societe du Spectacle', a
Warhol print and a Fluxus game by George Brecht are all in the frame in
this gloriously jumbled-up and refreshingly non-digital display of
parallel universe memorabilia.
Seen together, it's as obsessive a collection as the artists it gathers
for a fantasy salon that the Swiss cheese of the original Cabaret
Voltaire Dadaist boys club in Zurich could only wet-dream…

North West Northumberland Street Lane Aug 18-19, 25-26, or by
appointment
4 stars
In a residential dribe-in, a portable TV sits on a rug on the floor, a
bouquet of flowers laid down before it. On-screen, a collage of scenes
from a 1980s TV compendium of schlocky horror play out in Rebecca Key
with Melodien's 'Sevant! Sevant! Vol 1: Hammer House of Mystery and
Suspense.'. On the walls around it and in two other lock-ups either
side, pages of text-book guides to motherhood are pinned up and
subverted by Ailie Rutherford's overlaid drawings of suckling pigs and
jets of milk shooting from nipples, or else cotton reels criss-cross
each other as they run from a clump of coloured straws plugged into the
wall by Jo Arksey.
With a dozen or so artists' works crammed into the three spaces
alongside some back garden and front cellar installations, GARAGE is an
ingeniously busy temporary occupation of places used for private
hoarding or else plain old car parking…

When Vanishing Point artistic director Matthew Lenton spoke out
regarding arts funding body Creative Scotland's ill-thought out plans
that put the future of some forty-nine major organisations in jeopardy,
he was echoing the thoughts of everyone in the arts community who the
bureaucrats in Waverleygate are accountable to. The fact that Lenton
had the vocal support of National Theatre of Scotland head Vicky
Featherstone should make those same bureaucrats take serious notice. As
Lenton prepares for Wonderland, his contribution to Edinburgh
International Festival's theatre programme, it is clear that Vanishing
Point are a major international force, and their loss to Scotland would
be unforgivable.
Back in June, however, long before Lenton broke cover, he was getting
lost in an even darker mire than even the lower depths of Creative
Scotland could muster. On a big screen in a large Glasgow rehearsal
room, a live feed of a young woman's face can be seen in close-u…

Kings Theatre4 starsThe women who whinny and canter like horses as the audience enter are a striking introduction to Romanian maestro Silviu Purcarete’s impressionistic interpretation of Jonathan Swift’s great satirical novel. It’s as if they’re higher beings on a catwalk, tantalisingly untouchable but irresistible too. The fact that this image of Swift’s Houyhnhnms is almost immediately upstaged by something even greater speaks volumes about Purcarete’s power to impress, even as the feral Yahoos – human beings in their basest form – move in en masse.Taking the fourth book of Swift’s epic as his starting point, Purcarete maps out an absurd nightmare portrait of man’s inhumanity to man through two figures bookending the ages. As an old man is carted off to an institution, his storybook left behind, a little boy rides in on a wooden horse to pick up the pages. With the child onstage throughout, it’s as if the series of extravagant tableaux and ensemble-based sketches that follow are ext…

There have been a lot of riots in Chile lately. As radical director Guillermo Calderon prepare to return to Edinburgh International Festival with Villa and Discurso, a double bill of plays steeped in his country's heritage of the fascist dictatorship led for seventeen years by General Augusto Pinochet, it's a scene he knows well. Last week, the streets of Santiago and other Chilean cities were awash with protests by tens of thousands of students demonstrating about how the country's education system is run.

With word of the demonstrations spread via social media, student leaders encouraged their supporters to take up pits and pans to indulge in something called 'cacerolazos', a noisy form of protest used frequently during the Pinochet regime. As Calderon made clear when last in Edinburgh with his production of his play, Diciembre, Pinochet's brutal reign is the main influence on him as an artist. Talking the day before travelling to Edinburgh with his new produ…

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.